The EU energy road-map did seem to favour a 30% cut if other big emitters followed suit The European Commission will not urge EU nations to set tougher targets on climate change despite analysis showing that doing so would be cost-effective.
On Tuesday the commission will unveil a road-map on climate and energy policy.
Its own analysis said that a target of a 25% cut by 2020 could easily be met, and would be economically better than the existing target of 20%.
However, a senior diplomatic source has told BBC News that the final version will explicitly urge sticking at 20%.
The news has disappointed climate campaigners who accused heavy industries of "scaremongering".
The commission is also set to recommend that some of the 20% reduction can be achieved through buying emission credits from overseas, rather than entirely through cuts at home.
The analysis - leaked in a draft version of the road-map two weeks ago - said the price of carbon should be maintained through "setting aside" some of the allowances to emit that EU nations will receive for the period 2013-2020.
However, the BBC's source said this would not now be the case.
The door will be left open to adopting a 30% target if there is a new global deal under the UN climate negotiations.
Split ambitions
Bryony Worthington Sandbag“The scaremongering tactics of a handful of industrial lobbyists have successfully castrated Europe's climate ambitions”
The two commission directorates most closely involved in the issue - energy and climate - have been at loggerheads on the EU's ideal scale of ambition.
In the middle of last year, climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard released research showing that the economic slump had reduced emissions so much that the 20% or 30% targets would both be far cheaper to achieve than when they were adopted in 2008.
Emissions from industry, for example, fell by nearly 12% during 2009.
A group of academics calculated that given this fall, meeting the 20% target was tantamount to "business as usual".
Environmental groups have urged that in order to meet its "fair share" of global emissions cuts, and to re-invigorate the UN process, the EU should be contemplating 40%.
But energy commissioner Gunther Oettinger recently declared that going above 20% would lead to the "de-industrialisation" of Europe.
"Yet again it seems the scaremongering tactics of a handful of well connected industrial lobbyists have successfully castrated Europe's climate ambitions," said Baroness (Bryony) Worthington, director of the campaign organisation Sandbag.
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